By Amit Roy
London – It was reassuring to find my hero worship of the Dalai Lama shared by Hollywood actress Uma Thurman’s dad, Robert Thurman, 63, the Columbia university professor who happens to be America’s leading expert on Tibetan Buddhism.
Of all the people I have interviewed, the Dalai Lama is probably the noblest.
So Inzy and the boys missed a great opportunity when they refused to allow him to inaugurate their opening match in Dharamshala and to shake one of the greatest men in the world by the hand. Part of me would have been happy if the whole tour had been cancelled on this one issue of principle.
Thurman is a friend of the Dalai Lama. Last week, the Brunei Gallery in London was packed with people who turned up to witness ‘laugh a minute’ Thurman deliver a lecture on ‘Buddhism, Tantra and the Inner Modern Tibetan Identity’.
This was organised by Asia House and sponsored by the Indian metals millionaire Lord Raj Bagri.
Resolved to increase the intellectual content of the discussion, I asked Thurman about cricket. An amused Thurman replied: “The Dalai Lama doesn’t even like cricket.”
Thurman has no doubt that fear of what China would do — “cut off supplies of nuclear bits and pieces”, for example — lies behind Pakistan’s decision to insult the Dalai Lama.
Thurman has this theory that China deliberately supplies Pakistan with weapons as a way of “making India spend more money on defence and keeping a check on India”.
China has an obsessive and irrational hatred of the Dalai Lama. And yet, according to Thurman, the Dalai Lama could help to bring China in from the cold on the issue of Tibet.
“He could be China’s best friend,” argued Thurman.
